Over 6 years, 2x the performance in single-core and 4x (for 2.5x the cores, depending how you count) seems surprisingly low compared to stuff I've read (not experienced yet) with the M1.
I think a lot of the perceivable speedup in M1 Macs is less to do with these benchmarks and more to do with optimizing the OS and Apple software for the M1 and the various accelerators on the SoC (video encoding and ML).
Of course M1's are perceived as being faster because:
- video camera encoding/decoding is offloaded to a dedicated processor;
- disk encryption is offloaded to a dedicated processor;
- rendering is offloaded to dedicated GPU's;
- matrix multiplication is offloaded to dedicated matrix multiplication processors (neural engines);
- no wasteful memory transfers (even though the memory bus is 2048 bit wide anyway) across dedicated processors.
Kind of like channel processors running channel programs in IBM mainframes, brought to a mainstream ultraportable laptop.
And, on top of that, the screen that drops the refresh rate by a factor of 6 when there is no need to refresh the picture too often.
Ironically, the CPU is left with pretty much one job to do: to compute. It is possible to get fast compilation times whilst doing all of the above at once. Or have an app that does all of the above at once, too (no, it won't save Microsoft Teams). And be power efficient, too; hence a long battery life and an Apple marketing team brouhaha: «We can do this all day». They are right – they can actually do all of that, and they can brag about it now because they have a full list from the above fulfilled.
System performance is a holistic matter, not just single/multicore comparisons oftetimes taken out of the context.
Also remember that a lot of apple customers stick with absolutely ancient laptops and are then amazed when a modern one is much faster e.g. I had to explain what an NVME drive is to someone who is a great developer but just not a hardware guy.
Don’t really understand this argument - Apple has had 13 years to optimise Mac OS for Intel and only a couple of years for M1 / can’t see how a video encoding accelerator affects responsiveness.
I think you are on the right track, but I think the performance gain really comes from the RAM being on the chip itself, which raw number crunching won't make use (but actual usage will make great use of)
jermaustin1|4 years ago
inkyoto|4 years ago
Perception is key here.
Of course M1's are perceived as being faster because:
- video camera encoding/decoding is offloaded to a dedicated processor;
- disk encryption is offloaded to a dedicated processor;
- rendering is offloaded to dedicated GPU's;
- matrix multiplication is offloaded to dedicated matrix multiplication processors (neural engines);
- no wasteful memory transfers (even though the memory bus is 2048 bit wide anyway) across dedicated processors.
Kind of like channel processors running channel programs in IBM mainframes, brought to a mainstream ultraportable laptop.
And, on top of that, the screen that drops the refresh rate by a factor of 6 when there is no need to refresh the picture too often.
Ironically, the CPU is left with pretty much one job to do: to compute. It is possible to get fast compilation times whilst doing all of the above at once. Or have an app that does all of the above at once, too (no, it won't save Microsoft Teams). And be power efficient, too; hence a long battery life and an Apple marketing team brouhaha: «We can do this all day». They are right – they can actually do all of that, and they can brag about it now because they have a full list from the above fulfilled.
System performance is a holistic matter, not just single/multicore comparisons oftetimes taken out of the context.
giantrobot|4 years ago
There's plenty of ARM-specific optimization in macOS that gives boosts to M1s over Intel but the chips are just faster for many tasks than Intel.
mhh__|4 years ago
klelatti|4 years ago
larrik|4 years ago
r00fus|4 years ago
klelatti|4 years ago